PERSPECTIVE – Sarah Fritz, a musicologist, has been obsessed for the better part of the last decade with the life, music and historical importance of the 19th-century composer and pianist Clara Schumann. Her new book, Madame Composer: The virtuosic genius of Clara Schumann, will be out in October 2026 on Pegasus Books.
Reading Clara Schumann’s letters with Johannes Brahms initially sparked Fritz’s fascination. “I got so mind-blown by how much more important she was than I had realized,” Fritz said in this episode of Gail Wein’s Classical Gas podcast, directly below. “I started tweeting about her every day, thinking I might find a few hundred people who are also Clara fanatics.” Check out the full interview here:
Schumann, a piano prodigy born Clara Weick, was on the concert circuit for 60 years. She wrote dozens of compositions, and for a time was more famous than her husband, the composer Robert Schumann.
Fritz said that thousands of people have responded to her Twitter feed, and that she found it incredible to discover how many others were interested in Clara Schumann and her relevance today.
“She was internationally famous by the time she was 18 years old and all the men were jealous of the fame she achieved so young,” Fritz said. “And so for part of their marriage, Robert was known as the husband of Clara Wieck.”
